“I am becoming convinced along with you—now that my watch saw a Monitor-like vessel this morning—that Charleston just might be attacked,” Hale volunteered, the conviction growing in his mind.
“He may even have raised those ironclads,” said Helmuth.
“Yes,” admitted Hale. “And it would maybe take weeks to establish by sounding whether or not he has raised them—which might be too late then to prove to the navy or anyone that we may be dealing with a madman serious in his written intentions.”
“How could we, with only our boat howitzer, stop even one ironclad by itself?” Redpath looked at Hale.
“If only Fort Moultrie had been alerted by the mayor.” Hale reflected gloomily. “But they won’t see any ironclads anyway, as Thatcher is certain to instruct them to steer on the south side of the channel, away from Moultrie and near Sumter.”
“They wouldn’t if Sumter were manned,” commented Redpath.
Hale almost jumped up from his chair. “Didn’t they re-arm Sumter ten years ago with two Rodmans and some Parrott rifles?”
“I don’t know,” responded Redpath. “I heard they only kept a single ordnance sergeant there infrequently.” A subtle change of expression filled his face. “We have a navy gun crew.”
Realization also penetrated Helmuth’s mind. “You’re going to use Sumter as an artillery platform.” It was a statement, not a question.
Hale smiled. “Let’s take a look at the place now.” Then to Helmuth he added, “If I telegraph the admiral again that one of my men thinks he saw a Monitor class warship near here—I risk reprimand. I was ordered only to investigate the sunken Monitor class ships and to turn the other matter over to the civil authorities. On the other hand I can’t stand idly by because of red tape and see an American city destroyed by a madman. So I will secretly prepare militarily to receive him.”
* * * *
The external aspect of Fort Sumter was symbolic of what they later found inside. Ruin was everywhere. A stratum of balls, exploded shells, and commingled brick still remained in the outside walls after twenty years. The wooden gun platforms on the parapet had crumbled away. Within the subterranean reaches of the fort it was the same discouraging aspect. Mineral salts seeping through the dank ceilings had produced minute stalactites; a moldy fetor permeated the earth voids. The several decades of salt splashing through the open gun ports in the lowest casements had rusted the Parrott rifles into immobility.
Helmuth returned to the outside and stared disconsolately at the grass growing between the red bricks of one of the standing walls. Kicking among the debris, he unearthed grim mementos: great pieces of canister shot, rusty bits of iron, bolts and screws.
“I know it looks futile,” Hale was dejected looking, “but perhaps with some oil and a sledge we can get one of the better Parrotts to traverse.” Then Hale spoke to his chief gunner’s mate. “Bring our 12 pounder from the ship and set it atop the parapet to repulse any landing party.”
Giving his attention again to Helmuth, he went on. “When it’s dark, we’ll break into the Charleston armory and steal some shell and powder for our Parrott rifle. For that job I’d appreciate your talents as a locksmith.”
In the midst of positioning the boat howitzer atop the fort, a thunderstorm came up in the middle afternoon, driving all below into the dampish gun rooms. Rats, startled by their entrance, scurried away into secret crevices. After half an hour of lightning and driving rain, the storm ended.
As he strode out upon the wet, sandy parapet, Helmuth grew conscious of something out of the ordinary. He realized that now as well as the whole day he had heard no bird song nor the singing of any late summer crickets on the air. A strange sort of hush had fallen over all nature.
Twilight arrived, and in the moonless, cloudless heavens the stars were unusually bright and twinkling, the harbor unruffled by even a passing breeze. Climbing aboard the steam frigate, Helmuth remarked to Hale, “This atmosphere is unnatural tonight. It reminds me of Sunda Straits before Krakatau exploded.”
“I know. I sense it too.”
The Pegasus carried the picket boat to the harbor’s bar and lowered the craft and its two occupants into the water. “Remember, now,” Hale told them, “if you see a Monitor type ship enter the harbor, fire a rocket.”
* * * *
As the Pegasus steamed towards the city, Helmuth cocked his ear to listen to the rhythmic squeaking of a fiddle and the happy laughter of a group of young people assembled for a dance on nearby Sullivan’s island. With the peculiar oppressiveness of the atmosphere, the curiously motionless waves, and the unexplained stillness of all nature such joyful sounds contrasted eerily. Save for the few lights at the dance, the rest of the countryside on both shores was dark and crowded with nothing but the dark groves of pines peculiar to this region.
Leaving the mate and engineer aboard the Pegasus, Helmuth, Hale, and one seaman hired a horse and wagon and set out for the armory. On the way, Hale decided to brave official reprimand and try to convince Washington that something more definite should be done, that he personally now was convinced Thatcher would attack Charleston. So they waited for him as he stopped and went in the telegraph office.
In a moment he came out ashen-faced. “The telegraph lines are dead.”
“What!” But Helmuth knew what it might portend. As they drove up the street they glanced apprehensively in the direction of the harbor where the mooring lamps of several merchantmen glowed.
Helmuth had no sooner mastered the lock and led them in the armory when there came ominously a detonation like distant artillery, followed by a violent shaking of every timber in the building and the rattle of its window sashes and gas-fixtures. The far-off roar deepened into an awful din. The floor heaved underfoot; the walls visibly swayed to and fro, the crash of falling masses of stone, brick, and mortar was heard overhead and without. Helmuth experienced a strange feeling of nausea—as if he were seasick.
“What is it?” The seaman was terrified.
“Thatcher…” But Helmuth did not finish because a second, terrific shock almost underfoot threw them to the floor. And with it they heard a fearful crashing and saw that the unused chimneys had gone through the center of the armory, carrying with them fireplace mantels, furniture and everything else in their way, leaving a cavernous opening in the floor. Then the shock passed; the grandfather clock in the corner had stopped ticking, its hands at 9:50 P.M. Outside could be heard several steeple bells crazily tolling, having been sent into swaying motion by the tremor.
All three rushed to the street where their nostrils were offended by a sulphurous odor accompanied by what looked like a thin vapor rising in the streets’ gaslights. The city’s skyline was grimly etched in many directions by an ominous red glow: fires were starting. Where they stood the gaslights flickered feebly as a whitish cloud, dry and choking, stirred upward—the remains of masonry reduced to a powder on falling to the pavement and stone roadways.
CHAPTER 8.
Knight versus Rook
Helmuth stumbled over bricks and stones shaken from parapets and cornices and chanced entanglement in telegraph wires hanging in every direction from broken supports. Their wagon horse had fallen to the ground, its mouth flecked with foam, its body shivering in terror. Helmuth’s toes, which still were very sore and ached from the shark bite, hindered him as he struggled to hurry along the street.
That dreaded thunder came again. With it occurred a phenomenal rising and falling of the ground, like a “ground swell” seen in deep sea water. He saw a house on the street corner rise and fall as the earth beneath it undulated in an unmistakable motion, the waves travelling with incomparable swiftness; each moving ridge from trough to crest had a two foot shadow cast from the gaslight until the light was extinguished finally by the breaking of the pipe underground. At first he could hear the swishing of the tops of trees on both sides of the street as they bowed and swa
yed with the awesome ground ripple. But the noise from the earth’s bowels grew so deafening he now could not even hear the terrific crash of chimneys falling into the street dangerously near him. Charleston was in the throes of an earthquake.
People, crazed with fear, hurried into parks and public squares, the only places safe from falling buildings. A woman lay crushed to death where a brick building had fallen in a mass, none pausing to give her even a glance. A man with blood streaming from a head wound wandered among the crowd unquestioned.
Numerous long fissures in the ground existed from which bubbled cold water, sand and a blue mud. In the street from an old fire-well was spouting a solid geyser of water, ten feet high and nearly two feet thick.
They reached the docked Pegasus which was thumping dangerously against the pilings from the rough waves. “Get her into open water,” Hale ordered.
A bright flash of a signal rocket illuminated Fort Sumter and the harbor. Then as darkness rushed back into the vacuum, the delayed explosion echoed across the water. Hale and Helmuth searched seaward with their night glasses. There, passing within five hundred yards of the fort, almost in mid channel, was a rectangular blob of darkness—the Monitor!
In a minute a shot from the fort fell hissing into the sea near the ironclad.
“They must’ve thought the earthquake vibration and thunder was the Monitor shelling the city,” cried Hale.
“Your boat howitzer will never penetrate eight inches of armor, even if it’s rusted,” Helmuth felt the hopelessness of the situation.
“Mr. Redpath might bluff them into thinking something heavier is firing on them and they’ll back off. And if he’s lucky he might even lob some grapeshot through one of their gun ports. But—Lord help him!”
The Monitor’s turret moved slightly, then fire belched from its dark aperture. Helmuth swung his glasses to see the shell, fired purposely at a low elevation, so that it ricocheted on the water’s surface, struck the beach where it bounced over the parapet and burst in a deadly shower of metal splinters.
The expected second round came from the Monitor’s other gun a few minutes later, the shell ricocheting twice upon the water, the last time about twenty five yards from the shore where it struck a school of mullet fish, hurling one into the fort.
“Mr. Redpath’ll have that fish for supper,” Hale said wryly. Then added another thought, his professional commentary on the ricocheting tactic of gunfire “That Monitor gunner must be an ex-navy man, damn him!”
Several more shots from the fort clanged impotently against the Monitor’s plates as the latter, rather than manhandle its iron shutters to close the gun ports while they reloaded, revolved the turret.
There came a curious shivering motion underfoot, so that Helmuth grabbed the gunwale for support. With it that now familiar feeling of nausea returned. A prolonged rumble as of big siege mortars firing filled the air, drowning out the relatively puny artillery duel between the two antagonists. It was another earthquake shock. Imperceptibly, the Monitor swung around and crept at a snail like pace for the open sea.
“The last earthquake shock—they must think it’s Fort Moultrie firing on them!” shouted Hale. The Pegasus’ crew gave a noisy cheer.
The creak and splash of oars, then a bump into the side of the Pegasus startled all aboard. Thatcher and the pirate steamer had been carelessly forgotten. But over the side came only two seamen from the picket boat. Tersely, Hale related to them the initial cannonading was an earthquake, not shelling by the Monitor.
“Maybe that accounts for it,” opined one of them. “Just before we heard what you say was the first earthquake thunder, we saw a ‘ripple,’ its way marked by phosphorescence, coming on a course sou’ or sou’west to north. When it passed under us our boat was violently shaken from side to side; and we two old salts got awfully seasick. Simultaneously, we felt a shock as if our keel had thumped or grated on a pebbly bottom.”
“That,” interrupted the mate, “must have been the high wave that rolled into Cooper River, past the Pegasus’ mooring, where I saw it overflow the rice fields on the banks.”
“It’s odd,” said Helmuth, joining the conversation, “but I felt a nausea too when the shock vibrated through the ground under me in the city.”
During the few minutes they had talked a nameless steamer loomed up behind them—no running lights and painted black. Before Hale could try to shout orders to make way from her path, the steamer accidentally struck them, driving the smaller vessel onto a nearby shoal where she grounded. The steamer tried to pull free by reversing her screw but she was lodged within the little ship and barely moved.
Quickly a ship’s officer with drawn pistol jumped down upon the deck of the Pegasus followed by two seamen carrying lanterns and axes.
“We’re going to cut ourselves free from your ship, so don’t interfere.” He pointed his pistol in the face of the dumbfounded Hale.
“Why that’s Thatcher’s second mate!” cried Helmuth.
The man swung around and fired impulsively at him, the bullet creasing the detective’s cheek. Helmuth instinctively struck him on the jaw, driving the man against a boat davit which knocked him unconscious.
“Repel boarders!” shouted Hale, grabbing a blade from the cutlass rack and confronting the two steamer seamen. One jumped overboard, escaping for the shore; the other man meekly dropped his ax and put his hands over his head in a gesture of surrender.
The instant after the shot, another officer, who watched from the steamer, came bounding down with a howling roar, swinging a cutlass. Helmuth had barely time to retrieve the fallen pistol and fire it from a kneeling position at the dark maniacal figure who slashed at his left arm. The gun dropped from his fingers; the other seemed unaware of the wound Helmuth had inflicted.
Hale sprang up with his cutlass but something about the ferocious attacker caused a surprised look to fill his features. And in that moment of hesitation the other knocked Hale unconscious with the flat of his blade. Someone else, the mate, fired another bullet into the unheeding man, then slipped on the bloody deck and lost his weapon.
Helmuth now recognized the berserk individual, slashing and hacking at sailors scrambling for the cutlass rack, as Thatcher. The pirate captain and a navy seaman traded cutlass slashes, each drawing blood. Helmuth, his left arm bloody and useless, grabbed Hale’s cutlass from his fingers; and coming up behind Thatcher, he dealt a cut deeply in the side of his neck. Incredible as Thatcher’s endurance had been up to this point, the numerous wounds, but especially this last one, drained even his tremendous strength and he fell senseless. Helmuth too slumped against a mast from loss of blood.
Another antagonist appeared, Mate Wragge, with drawn pistol. “Stay clear or I’ll shoot,” he warned the sullen crew of the Pegasus. Between him and another deck officer they pulled Thatcher, now half-conscious, back aboard the Rook.
With utter disregard for additional damage to her bottom plates, the steamer violently reversed her screw, warped free from the Pegasus and was lost very soon in the darkness.
A damage control party had rigged a canvas patch over the stoved-in bow section and now furiously pumped to restore enough buoyancy to float her off the shoal. As the mate bandaged up Hale’s head, Helmuth studied the lieutenant, in silence, then finally spoke.
“Why did you stop in mid-swing at Thatcher?” he asked.
“It was strange, I admit,” Hale paused, thinking about something. “I’ve never before seen Thatcher till this day. But I recognized his features as those of a man long dead…no, wait; let me continue. In the governor’s house in Port Royal is a portrait gallery. Among the many pictures he has several curiosities. I don’t have to tell you how the old pirates pretentiously mimicked the 17th century aristocracy. Well, one of them captured on a Spanish ship, among other things, a portrait painter. And several of the pirates grandiosely sat for their portraits—Blackbeard among t
hem. Your Captain Thatcher has the very face of the Blackbeard portrait!…
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™ Vol 2: George T. Wetzel Page 16